Ed Eaton

Christmas tree creator was drag racing's first East Coast sheriff

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

It all started in California, but it didn't stay there. On the Atlantic seaboard, performance addicts were reading about the dry-lakes scene out West, and doing some improvising. They didn't have dusty alkali beds reaching to the horizon, so instead, their hot cars competed in shorter, but more brutal, battles of acceleration.
This was the environment in which Ed Eaton, who would become a hugely influential figure in drag racing history, was raised. His name might not be as immediately recognizable as some of the West Coast drag founders, but more than anyone else, Eaton extended their organizational and regulatory reach eastward into what had largely been unfettered territory in terms of organization. His sudden ascension as the National Hot Rod Association's first Eastern organizer and enforcer required him, as one contemporary put it, to be "tungsten-tough."
Eaton was born, and lived for years, in the town of Glen Cove, on New York's Long Island. He and his brother began fooling with cars in the years before World War II, first gunning his father's 1936 Ford in the impromptu Street races that were beginning to take place. After the war, Eaton had a stripped 1934 Ford roadster as his first car, then graduated to a 1941 Hupmobile Skylark powered by, a supercharged Ford flathead V-8. He started his own club, the Long Island Hot Rod Association, and showed impressive prescience by reaching out to the New York media to cover the club's races.
It paid off, as the New York Daily News showed up to cover an LIHRA race on a closed-off Glen Cove street, and the story was picked up by the King Features syndicate and published in newspapers nationally. That, in turn, led to a photo feature on the Long Island races that appeared in Life magazine.
By this time, Eaton was a member of the NHRA and was corresponding regularly with its founder, Wally Parks. The LIHRA had come under the umbrella of the short-lived Auto Timing Association of America in Chicago, and Eaton had round a local racing venue at the North-port sand pits before opening Westhampton Drag Strip on eastern Long Island in 1935. Two years later, Eaton traveled to the NHRA Nationals in Oklahoma Cur where he met Parks, who later visited Eaton at the speed shop he was then running in Huntington, Long Island.
"He stopped in and we sat down, and we discussed his vision of all this, and my vision," Eaton recalled. "I knew the guy, and I liked what he had to say. In 1958, he made me his first regional director for the East Coast, but the territory really ran from Quebec to Florida, and all the way to Michigan. I remember that I could write the rulebook down on a sheet of paper. It was tough with all the travel, but I enjoyed every minute of it."
Eaton's travels to organize car clubs under the NHRA's aegis quickly brought him onto the turf of the New England Hot Rod Club, whose members were racing at locales such as Sanford, Maine, and Charlestown, Rhode Island. In their definitive history of early New England drag racing, Cool Cars Square Roll Bars, authors Arnie and Bernie Shuman recalled how Eaton handled the locals as they bristled over the NHRA's insistence on safety procedures and nitromethane prohibition in the late Fifties.
"For them, with their open resentment of the NHRA's philosophy, Ed Eaton became a lightning rod, zapped from every direction," the authors wrote. "Zapped, but not phased, as far as any one could tell. His skin was the perfect thickness or the job."
Eaton recalled one incident at Sebring, Florida, where he interrupted a run by Don Garlits, who was trying to secure his brother in his dragster's cockpit using a length of rope as a shoulder belt. A wild two years barnstorming the East led to his promotion to National Competition Director in 1959, in time to be lead official at the U.S. Nationals in Detroit in 1959 and 1960. Eaton tapped into his New York connections again, convincing ABC Sports producer Jim Spence to send a crew to the 1960 Nationals, which was an early delayed segment on ABC's Wide World of Sports when it debuted in 1961, the earliest progenitor of today's live coverage on ESPN2.
His enduring contribution, however, will be his innovation that ended the jobs of drag racing's sky-leaping flagmen, but probably saved some of them from being flattened. Some racers had already honed an instinct of knowing when the flagger was about to lift the green skyward, starting the race. Others went further, trying to intimidate the flagman with their own takeoff on baseball's brush-back. Drag racing was beginning to experiment with the handicapped start in 1962, using two flagmen, one 30 feet out from the starting line, a potential disaster on every run. Eaton did some thinking about it.
He had been watching flaggers, and realized they took about 2-1/2 seconds to raise the flag after both racers staged. He came up with a countdown system of five yellow lights, each flashing at half-second intervals before the green would light. Division 1 Director Lou Bond developed the electronics to make it work, and the Christmas tree's first official race was the 1963 Winternationals. Eaton left NHRA the following year to manage a chain of strips.
"I absolutely enjoyed what I did," he said. "The only bad part was having to beat on the safety issues so much in the early days. A lot of guys wouldn't buy into it, hut I look back and I'm proud of the lives I probably saved."

This article originally appeared in the June, 2004 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.